django-email-authentication

An extension to django.contrib.auth that replaces username-based authentication with email-based authentication, without requiring any changes to existing applications that depend on the django.contrib.auth.User model.

Installation

• Add emailauth to your INSTALLED_APPS in your Django settings file.
• Replace django.contrib.backends.ModelBackend in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting with emailauth.backends.ModelBackend. It's not recommended that you use both the built-in ModelBackend and the replacement ModelBackend at the same time (although it it technically possible to do so.)
• Replace the following built-in forms and views:
  • django.contrib.auth.views.login with emailauth.views.login
  • django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset with emailauth.views.password_reset
  • django.contrib.auth.forms.AuthenticationForm with emailauth.forms.AuthenticationForm
  • django.contrib.auth.forms.UserCreationForm with emailauth.forms.UserCreationForm
  • django.contrib.auth.forms.UserChangeForm with emailauth.forms.UserChangeForm
  • django.contrib.auth.forms.PasswordResetForm with emailauth.forms.PasswordResetForm
  • django.contrib.auth.forms.AdminAuthenticationForm with emailauth.forms.AdminAuthenticationForm
• If you use a custom AdminSite instance, modify it to match the implementation in emailauth.admin.
• If you have modified the default registration/password_reset_email.html template, update it to match the template provided with emailauth. (If you have not modified it, no action is necessary.)
• Make sure that you're not using username anywhere in your application.

Important Caveats

This is not simply a drop-in application. This application monkey patches the buit-in User model in several ways that could break existing applications, and will at least require a database migration on existing projects. These include:

• Changes to the User model:
  • The username field has max_length=254. (This is modifiable by settings.MAXIMUM_USERNAME_LENGTH, which is the same as settings.MAXIMUM_EMAIL_LENGTH, unless otherwise specified.)
  • The email field now has these changed attributes:
    • blank=False
    • null=False
    • unique=True
    • max_length=254 (This is modifiable by settings.MAXIMUM_EMAIL_LENGTH)
• The addition a signal to ensure that User.username is a mirror of User.email (This may interact in unexpected/catastrophic ways with existing data!)

Disclaimer

This is basically one big hack on top of the built-in auth module to coerce it into behaving in ways it was not designed to behave by using dirty hacks and abusing the private Model API. This is not guaranteed to continue to work with any version of Django in the future (or any current or previous versions, for that matter.)